Google Kicks Off Summer of Code 2012

Past participants have helped improve everything from popular web frameworks to browser add-ons and even operating systems. Summer of Code is also not a half bad way to get yourself on Google’s radar — the company looks at the results of the program to help it “identify potential recruits.”

Summer of Code has served as a launchpad for quite a few new open source software projects as well as helping to jumpstart work on existing favorites. This year’s roster includes some 1,208 students who will spend the next 12 weeks writing code for 180 different open source organizations.

With 208 proposed projects, there’s a pretty good chance that some Summer of Code improvements will be rolled into your favorite open source projects later this year. Among the things we’ll be keeping an eye on are Metalink’s various efforts to improve the download capabilities in Firefox and Chrome. Eventually Metalink wants to bring error recovery/repair for large downloads to everything from Chrome to wget.